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Finally it’s here: Sullivan’s casino opening

Courtesy of the Times-Herald Record: Signs, signs, everywhere the signs. Former Town of Thompson Supervisor Tony Cellini remembers them well.

He first spotted all the “Casinos mean jobs” billboards, buttons and bumper stickers along Route 42 in 1963, driving his new Corvette Stingray from Port Jervis as he moved to Sullivan County.

The county’s resorts had quietly begun their gradual decline after peaking in popularity with 530-plus hotels in the mid-1950s, county historian John Conway said. The solution, first proposed more than five decades ago, was to head off growing competition from Las Vegas with a Catskills casino.